New Routemaster shows the British love of old things

The new Routemaster, unveiled yesterday, may have been modified with up-to-date touches but its shape remains essentially the same as its original 1954 design. And that shouldn't be surprising. Throughout recent design history, the English have been unusually given to repeated imitations of a previous age. Three of the great national clichés – the black cab, the red phone box and the Routemaster – all satisfy the English desire for old-fashioned things.

The curved top of the phone box – the red K6 designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1935 – was in conscious imitation of the early nineteenth-century ‘trampoline ceiling’ in Sir John Soane’s house, now the Sir John Soane Museum, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. And the current black cab, the TX4 (2007 to date), and its predecessors (the TXII, 2002–6, and the TX1, 1997–2002) are in direct imitation of the Austin FX4, the definitive cab, produced from 1958 to 1997. That in turn was an imitation of the even more old-fashioned Austin FX3 (1948–58).

This taste for historical revivalism has been strong in England for centuries. It’s remarkable, even if we don’t remark on it much, that the train stations of the great new railway age in the mid to late nineteenth century were built to look like medieval Gothic cathedrals.

John Betjeman pointed out that Liverpool Street Station was built on the Latin Cross plan of a Gothic cathedral, complete with triplets of Early English Gothic lancet windows; the original station canteen was exactly where the altar would be. St Pancras’s train shed has a pointed Gothic arch, while its attached hotel, the Midland Grand, was a confection of Venetian and Lombardic Gothic, combined with details borrowed from Westminster Abbey, and from Winchester and Salisbury Cathedrals.

Historical revivalism was at work through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. England’s Palladian country houses were inspired by Andrea Palladio’s late sixteenth-century palazzi in the Veneto; Victorian Gothic Revival churches happily imitated fourteenth-century designs – and the Gothic Revival appeared in England half a century before it materialized on the Continent.

It doesn’t matter much if those historical styles are mixed up in the same building, either. Perhaps the most famous building in the country, the Houses of Parliament, is a mixture of Perpendicular Gothic, in its detail, and classical symmetry, in its plan, reflecting the tastes of its two architects: the arch Gothic revivalist, A. W. Pugin, and the classicallyminded Sir Charles Barry. St Paul’s Cathedral, for all its vogueish, early eighteenth-century classical skin, is built on the archaic Latin Cross ground plan of the Gothic cathedral; and it’s supported by another Gothic device, the flying buttress.

Jokey historical buildings, follies included, also go down particularly well with the English – like the McDonald’s on the London Road leading out of Oxford, done up in gleeful OTT Mock Tudor style.

England was the first country, in fact, to mix architectural function and form so dramatically. Nineteenth-century cotton warehouses in Manchester and Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs, like the Reform and the Travellers, were dressed in the clothes of Genoese merchant palazzi. Victorian Holloway Jail, in north London, was done up as a medieval castle. The 1762 summerhouse at Kew Gardens was designed by Sir William Chambers as a ten-storey Chinese pagoda. Those ten storeys also expose the knockabout, carefree English approach to architecture; genuine Japanese pagodas are supposed to have an odd number of storeys, the implication being that only God can provide the perfection associated with an even number.

The English love to pump up the fantasy in these playful buildings. In places like Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, the Gothic Revival got much more fantastical than its original medieval inspiration ever did, reaching Disneyland extremes of inflated machicolations, gingerbread crenellations and the sort of candle-snuffer towers designed for wimple-wearing maidens to let their hair down from. This is essentially high-camp larkiness; the innate artistic conservatism of the English means they are reluctant to create, or fully embrace, serious, revolutionary artistic and architectural styles.

Like all new generations, we like to think we're different from previous ones but, in the essentials, we remain the same – we like old stuff.